tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-75968962026-01-27T09:39:21.919+13:00My journey, an occasional diary from Auckland, New ZealandJulia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00484243389651191571noreply@blogger.comBlogger295125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-14365883664786646622026-01-27T09:05:00.004+13:002026-01-27T09:39:21.867+13:00

 I was asked what an earlier version of this meme meant. Usually my memes are pretty obvious, even the ones with second meanings are only very shallowly hidden. I briefly considered doing what Beckett did about the meaning of the play and the characters: He claimed that he knew nothing more than was in the script.This is obviously a reference to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot which makes

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-68649269105593528622024-08-18T15:37:00.000+12:002024-08-18T15:37:28.265+12:00

Circa 1980 I started being a database developer. Originally on non-relational (Hierarchical / Network) databases such as Burroughs Forte, CA(?) TOTAL and IBM's DL/1 but exclusively on relational databases since 1996. Given this, what I'm about to say may surprise you: There are some problems where a spreadsheet is the most efficient solution. The real difficulty with spreadsheets is they can

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-59369596849853576622021-04-29T21:12:00.000+12:002021-04-29T21:12:23.257+12:00

 We have a philosophy that there should be no single point of failure for our shows. This applies to people as well as tech, but this document is going to concentrate on the tech. For people it means we both know how to do everything that needs to be done and every item in the main set of tech is light enough for either of us to carry unassisted.With tech, when we say no single point of

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-5056187312195226672020-06-11T10:34:00.002+12:002020-06-11T10:40:10.577+12:00

A huge number of live performances have been cancelled around the world in 2020, including the festivals that helped many creatives find audiences.We've watched this with much pain & have decided to create a fringe festival of live streamed events & shows in August and September. Like many other fringe festivals, it is unjuried (open access). Unlike other festivals, we don't restrict

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-77490498818390251582020-05-08T22:19:00.002+12:002024-05-30T10:12:27.811+12:00

I just watched an experienced comedian struggling with the live streamed experience. It's a different environment & simply not the same as performing before a live audience. You just have to imagine they are there & are reacting. Streaming through a medium like Facebook means you not only can't hear the audience reaction, but there may be a non-trivial delay before the audience even sees

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-72844211767107911882019-12-20T08:03:00.001+13:002019-12-20T08:19:12.993+13:00

After a lineup show other comedians sometimes ask me for "notes" (feedback) on their performance. I usually can't do this in a useful way, this is specially true for shows I'm helping to run such as our own One Mic Stand-up but also applies when I'm just a member of the line-up. If I'm at a show, I'm almost always there to work. I may be a performer, I may be the MC, or I may be the

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-40306897234045311202019-12-14T18:43:00.000+13:002020-06-11T10:41:01.016+12:00

It's finally no longer under embargo. We're putting our comedy play The Grin Reaper on as part of Auckland Fringe in 2020. The shows will be at 8 PM 26-28th February at TST Studio, 37 Mt Eden Road. That's right next door to The Powerstation. This won't be quite the same show as we did in Palmerston North. We're going to have three cast members which means that the monologues we wrote

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-27432401902052733342019-10-28T10:08:00.001+13:002019-12-14T18:43:55.870+13:00

Two years ago today I wrote this on Facebook. "I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel and story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. " -- Philip K Dick Substitute comedy/comedian for novel/novelist and

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-25051749300075045892019-08-18T13:02:00.002+12:002020-06-11T10:41:23.461+12:00

Interesting anniversary. Four years ago today I announced that I was dropping out of comedy for a few weeks. Except it wasn't as Julia Clement I announced it, it was done under my birth name. At that point I was living a weird mixed life where in a very few contexts I was Julia & not in others. Tessa Clement knew & I think I'd made contact with Genderbridge. What I didn't say in this

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-48998530603046268832019-06-22T20:40:00.000+12:002019-06-22T20:44:39.529+12:00

I looked straight at him, I had guessed this question would come and I thought I was prepared. I had a well rehearsed answer, an answer I had told myself so many times and occasionally told others I knew it by heart. It was an answer I believed. In retrospect I should have seen the danger signs. I’m a performer, a comedian my art is painted in words and people sometimes come up to me after

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-19197379948878977172018-12-05T22:49:00.001+13:002019-01-19T11:35:15.549+13:00

I've just added a page listing the cast and characters for the 10 Years a Comedian show to the website. Obviously Julia, Tessa & Nicola are the cast while DEATH is a character and it was easy to list all four. Then there were three interesting cases. Hand Sanitizer Guy is one. In 2013 when I performed that set I didn't think of him as anything more than a slightly amplified version of

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-28249413858241840442018-12-02T22:32:00.001+13:002024-05-30T10:16:21.817+12:00

This is a follow-on to my previous posting about DEATH the character. Basically Terry Pratchett's Death and DEATH are both parodies of other personifications of death and we've both used pop-culture references as a starting point but ended up in different places. I drew on similar sources to Pratchett, especially Bergman's The Seventh Seal and was aware of Death Takes A Holiday (Although

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-63640958591618388842018-11-30T23:38:00.001+13:002024-05-30T10:20:10.286+12:00

I'm having fun posting on Facebook as DEATH. Since I decided to revive the character for my 2019 Auckland Fringe show 10 Years A Comedian, 3 In A Skirt and created a page for it, it's taken on a life of its own. (Sorry about the puns). My rules are fairly simple: Anything I publish as DEATH is in character DEATH is not cruel and does not kill, just shows up at the time of death and so has a

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-6011716815079678462018-10-05T20:43:00.000+13:002018-10-05T20:43:39.837+13:00

My introduction to SQL was circa 1995 when a large data warehousing project had managed to build a month-end data analysis routine that they discovered was going to take more than 31 days to run. They read somewhere that embedded SQL was faster & I was asked to rewrite it in C with embedded SQL. I worked with an SQL "specialist" & I did the C part, except he occasionally modified the C

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-51823222461416614032018-09-23T23:31:00.004+12:002018-11-30T23:17:14.904+13:00

I am the only M2F transgender stand-up comedian I know of in New Zealand and on Tuesday coming I will have been that for 3 years. It looks like that's coming to an end. A couple of months over 3 years ago I needed to decide if I wanted to continue doing stand-up with a male presentation for a few months or years or to bite the bullet and become Julia on stage now. Looking back I don't understand

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-85041025563946530312018-09-23T22:06:00.000+12:002018-09-24T00:00:03.071+12:00

This is another one from 1992 in alt.folklore.urban. Someone had asked about the possibility of the urban legend about rats swimming around the S bend and biting people where it hurts. My reply: I've had a different, but similar experience. My pet rat had the tip of her tail amputated (After a severe bite from my other pet rat), and on Sunday, two days after the operation, her balance was

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-45479667927996852182018-09-22T10:25:00.005+12:002018-09-23T23:36:05.344+12:00

I just stumbled across this reply I made in 1992 on UseNet to the question "What's a snuff film?": Snuff is powered tobacco often with added aromatic substances. A snuff film is a government announcement which shows how using snuff slowly addles the brain & causes the habitue to fall into a degenerate state. A prime example of the gendre is "Snuff, devil's powder from hell" (193?) which

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-76385622475667608782018-08-24T14:03:00.000+12:002018-08-24T14:41:25.014+12:00

Making a few guesses here, but perhaps In 10 years: 1. Facebook or a Facebooklike service will exist and will be universally used for keeping in touch with friends and families. It will be impossible to function in most organised recreational milieux and many occupations without using that service (It's already impossible to get started as an amateur comedian in Auckland without Facebook as

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-85063085529963482472018-08-14T21:10:00.000+12:002018-11-30T23:17:14.934+13:00

Looking back at old stuff can be interesting, and sometimes scary. My comedy career really started in mid 2015, but there were precursors. In 2008 I decided I would like to try doing stand-up just once, I did it, I got laughs & I walked away happy ticking stand-up off my bucket list. 5 years later I thought I'd like to try something different so I went back, did it, got laughs and was happy.

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-13338770022566847122018-03-03T16:15:00.001+13:002022-09-20T17:06:44.218+12:00

Publicity Shot Cornwall Park 10 days before opening. It shows the staging I used for the show recreated outdoors. I did my laundry this morning and as I hung the three red tops & three pairs of black trousers I wore on stage (one pair each night) I decided it was time to record my feelings and discoveries about the initial run of my one woman show 50 Years Before The Frock. Initially I

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-52981018648298968032017-12-01T07:42:00.001+13:002018-08-14T21:26:50.575+12:00

Written on World AIDS day 2017 I was most involved with the NZ male gay scene during the late 1970s and 1980s. I wasn't gay and didn't have much sex, but it was a safe place for me to be so I chose to be there. In those days when men came out after years or decades of repressing their sexuality many (most) of them understandably went wild and spent 2 or 3 years having as much sex as possible

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-22552208138493406832017-11-18T00:25:00.000+13:002018-11-30T23:17:14.816+13:00

You'd have to have been living in  a white house to be unaware of the recent fuss over sexual harassment in the entertainment industry.  Recently American comedian Louis CK has been shown to be a despicable person, and people are lining up to say that they always knew his work was unacceptable. What's bugging me about the recent comments on his work is that just a few weeks ago the

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-48647566467937966972017-11-16T23:07:00.001+13:002022-09-20T17:08:04.061+12:00

My comedy material has evolved over time. Although much of my early comedy was firmly based in science and reality, I was after jokes that made people laugh. When I first transitioned my material was a mix of psychologically or emotionally true jokes and cheap attempts at comedy. Last night there was one joke in my set that wasn't closely based on a real experience of mine. Today I decided to

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-46959318331674566302017-10-28T22:22:00.001+13:002017-10-28T22:22:37.411+13:00

I've been having a rough time of it today. I feel totally sapped of energy and motivation. There's any number of possible causes, some of the recent discussions in social media have increased the stress I mentioned in my last update and further depressed me. Alternately It could well be my medication. Today is day ten of a two week course of doxycycline. I developed boils in several different

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7596896.post-3916359494320301802017-10-12T08:29:00.000+13:002018-11-30T23:20:51.361+13:00

I'm a member of a secret Facebook group where comedians run draft jokes past each other and sometimes ask for other tips. Recently a person asked how we remember the running order for our intended set. It's a truism that the art of comedy is concealing the art, so I hope I'm not giving away too many secrets here. For me confidence is the key. Earlier in the day I run through my jokes

Julia Clementhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04927558272790269433noreply@blogger.com0